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What language would/do you use to build a web application?

There was an interesting poll on Hacker News a couple of days ago that I decided to bookmark for later and check out again after the results had mostly stabilized. The question asked was “What Language would/do you use to build a web application?“. It’s been almost 2 weeks since that poll so I think it’s safe to assume the results won’t change much anymore. Here they are in a nice bar graph, courtesy of Google Docs:

To a regular reader of Hacker News, the results aren’t really surprising. Especially Python is very popular among users there. A little surprise at first sight may be that PHP came in so close to the top, at third place. When reading Hacker News, you could get the impression that everybody hates PHP. But I think that’s a very common misconception about PHP. Not many people hate the language, it’s just that the people who do tend to be very vocal about it.

Now, this is just the snapshot of an opinion and you cannot derive any trends whatsoever, but personally I guess that Java and C# are descending, slowly followed by PHP, Ruby and Python and that languages like JavaScript and Go are rising towards the top. It would be interesting to have a similar poll in a year or so.

Also, I have no idea who the one person is that would/does use Visual Basic to build a web application, but I salute that brave soul.